As a practicing clinician, you may not treat Personality Disorders, but every patient you treat has a personality. Knowing something about their personality can provide a useful context for better understanding the nature of their presenting problems and guiding potential approaches to treatment.

This workshop compares and contrasts different approaches to understanding the Personality Disorders, emphasizing the recent divergence between the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), which is a categorical approach, and the World Health Organization's (WHO) International Classification of Diseases (ICD), which advances a dimensional approach.

In this presentation, Dr. Greg Neimeyer discusses these differences and their clinical implications. Case illustrations highlight the advantages and disadvantages of the two different approaches, and brief, clinically useful personality assessments, like the PID-5, are showcased. This practical workshop is intended for professional therapists who are interested in the important role of personality and personality disorders in the process and outcomes of their clinical work.

Learning Objectives

1. Identify any three Personality Disorders that have been discontinued in the DSM.
2. Discuss the advantages of a dimensional approach over a categorical approach to diagnosing personality disorders.
3. Identify at least three of the five personality dimensions used in the new ICD-11 approach to diagnosing personality disorders.